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The designers here at BusinessLogos have designed thousands of logos, and have had the chance to critique and revise thousands more. Every day we see these common mistakes that customers and designers make, which cause their business to look weak, unprofessional, and will end up costing the companies sales, respect and profit.

You don’t have to have a huge budget to get quality design, but you DO have to pay for experience, so that you can avoid these mistakes.

This icon is available through stock art stores like Shutterstock, and also through most of the designers on DesignCrowd.

5. Uncopyrightable Design

You find this with crowdsourced design companies like 99designs or DesignCrowd. The designers can’t spend a lot of time on each logo, so they recycle clip art or re-use designs they’ve made for other companies. There’s no system in place to prevent the same art being used my multiple companies, so there is no way to copyright the logo. We’ve spoken with many upset customers that have found this out the hard way.

4. Too Many Elements

“Great, now we just need some napkins, because that’s another thing we provide.”

The idea of the logo is to put a professional “signature” on your business. It is not your entire brand message, nor a sales brochure for your business. It should not bear the burden of communicating every aspect for business (that’s what your marketing is for). But too many business owners want to make sure every product, service, or design idea they can come up with is included in the logo, making it a convoluted mess.

This also happens when business owners receive their initial concepts form a design company, and want to “add value” to their design purchase by piling on ideas. Again, this makes your message LESS clear, and will turn off clients and potential business partners.

3. Amateur Design

It’s a trusim in every aspect of the business world: you get what you pay for. If you have your 10-year old niece draw your logo’s character for $5, the value will show. If you get 100 designs for $50, the value will show.

2. Unnecessary Text

If you need to have a tagline, great; just leave it out of the logo. Let it be a part of your business card or website. The idea of a logo is to get it stripped down to the essentials, and your address and hours or operation are not essentials. LLC and INC are legally required in your legal documents, but not in your logo, and they tend to make your logo look less professional.

1. Not Designing with All Uses In Mind

The reason logo design is all about simplicity is because your logo needs to be flexible. It’s going to be used in different ways, like embroidery, web and animation. It’s print requirements will be different from it’s web requirements. So it’s not a good idea to use too many gradients and complex illustrations, because that doesn’t translate well to embroidery, for example. Experienced designers know how to design logos that will work for all forms of media that you might use.

Getting your logo done right is a very important part of starting your business. It’s worth the cost to have it done right.

As I mentioned a week or so ago (here), we get far more requests for icons in logos than logotypes. When an icon reflects the simple idea that a brand represents, they make great logos. But if the icon is a symbol that’s not obviously connected to the product or company name, well, it’s less important. In those cases, a logo made up of a unique type treatment may be more effective.

Here are two logotypes from the archive that I happen to like very much. The first was created for a client who asked for a high-tech logo in black and a vibrant red. They also asked for something clean and simple. This was one idea we presented:

The next logo was created for a company that specializes in community governance models. They asked for something “minimalist” and simple. Our designers presented this as one of the options:

I like both for their simplicity. But perhaps the most important strength of a typographic logo is that the only image the customer sees/reads is the company name. Something to think about when you create your next logo.